Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Lessons learned from my 10 year open source project
I've been developing SpiderFoot (an OSINT/recon tool) for 10 years now, so wanted to share my story and try to distill some lessons learned in the hope they might be helpful to others here who might be considering writing/open-sourcing their own tools. Here's the post: https://medium.com/@micallst/lessons-learned-from-my-10-year-open-source-project-4a4c8c2b4f64 And the repo if you want to check it out: https://github.com/smicallef/spiderfoot -- TL;DR version of lessons from the post.. Lesson 1: Writing open source software can be very…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Lessons learned from my 10 year open source project launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
🌐 The Internet Computer! Free, Open-Source, and Self-Hostable. - HeyPuter/puter
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
I work on R00M 101, a Reddit-based OSINT profiler. While building it, I realized most open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools are scattered across GitHub, outdated blog posts, or random Discords. So I put together a public-facing directory of 100+ OSINT tools used by analysts, journalists, and security folks, free, filterable, and categorized by risk, platform, and use case. The idea was to make something useful and no-friction. Built with static HTML + SQL backend + a lot of caffeine. Would love feedback on how to improve the UX or tool curation. If anyone wants to contribute tools or help…
2025 · r00m101.com · its alternatives →
- 3IW
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →
- 4
- 5
Hey HN, I just wanted to share that after five months of intense work and countless caffeine-fueled writing sessions, "Master Software Architecture: A Pragmatic Guide" is now available. Writing this book was a crazy time. I entirely focused on it, and it took exactly 753 hours of writing, editing, and image editing & resizing(!) until the premiere. Yes, the last one (images) was a killer. If you ever think about writing a book, reserve a lot of time for it unless someone else does it for you. As a result, I am handing you the nearly 400-page book. It is a guide that will help you connect all…
2024 · leanpub.com · its alternatives →
- 6
How to help more people discover software development
2015 · changelog.com · its alternatives →
- 7OS
I got tired of collecting open source projects in my chrome bookmarks so I decided to compile a curated list of: - Recently active projects on GitHub - Mostly dev tools (but also productivity, analytics) - Projects which are "Alternative to X software" My bookmarks are finally empty:D If you have a great open source tool you use, I'd be glad to hear your suggestions. Also, any feedback is greatly appreciated.
2025 · alternativeoss.com · its alternatives →
- 8IJ
2011 · codebrief.com · its alternatives →
- 9CL
Hey people! I have been compiling a database of opensource alternatives and I'm super proud of it so far. It serves as a searchable directory for high-quality opensource. After tons of hours I've managed to compile a database of 1000+ opensource software. I've seen other sites which have the same premise and all the GitHub Awesome Lists, but they lack in showing if the repo is active, abandoned, experimental, buggy/unstable, has a restrictive license or corporate influence like this does. Thanks for your time, if you have any recommendations for features/additions I'd love to hear.
Feb 2026 · opensrc.me · its alternatives →
- 10MP
My weekly(ish) video logs tracking my progress of building a completely sound statically typed language and structural editor. The motivation is to make lots of invalid programs unrepresentable.
2022 · petersaxton.uk · its alternatives →
- 11IB
As a software engineer, my reflex has always been to script everything I can. Scripting is easy, but everything around it is tricky: scripts have to run somewhere, they need access to credentials, they need to be monitored. None of it is simple. No-code automation platforms such as Zapier or IFTTT are too restrictive for technical tasks; CI/CD platforms make it easy to script tasks related to a repository, but are limited when trying to do anything else. I wanted the low level control you have when writing scripts while retaining the comfort of a platform managing execution for me. So I…
2022 · exograd.com · its alternatives →
- 12LA
Hello HN, I am building a devtool to understand existing codebases. The idea originates from my time at big tech as well as various attempts to get involved in open source projects. When I was in college I wanted to improve my coding skills by contributing to opensource projects. I would pickup a bug or feature request but I always found myself stuck at the very first step. I did not understood where and how to begin contributing. I once submitted a patch in firefox which was labeled "Good first issue" but that was still very handheld. The assigner told me exactly which files I need to…
2024 · lucidcode.ai · its alternatives →
- 13
I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Howdy friends. I've been a zero to one product manager for 12 plus years and along the way I kept borrowing pieces from different discovery frameworks until I had a methodology of my own, one that actually raises the odds of an idea succeeding. This does not replace user interviews obviously, but it leads you in the right direction. Looking forward for your feedback
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15FA
Hey Friends, I always considered doing a show HN about this but never took the jump but since we're in the Show HN carnival I decided to share it. I wrote a free and open source quick guide to teach Firefox OS application development. With this ebook you go from zero to a little application in the Firefox Marketplace. https://leanpub.com/quickguidefirefoxosdevelopment/ I created this to give away at hackathons and hack days because the Mozilla docs were spread all over the developer hub, mdn and the wiki so it was hard for new developers to find what they needed. The…
2014 · its alternatives →
- 16
Linux Foundation survey says 70-90% of modern software constitute OSS code. Yet we are stuck with tools that scan only for vulnerabilities in 3rd party libraries and that too with high degree of false positives. I built `vet` for policy and data driven analysis of 3rd party packages that goes beyond only vulnerability and allows codifying organisational policies related to OSS consumption. https://github.com/safedep/vet Looking forward to feedback and suggestions from HN :)
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17DD
Myself and three friends, for the last year have been building our own side project, the aim of this side project was to show off the creative side of developers. One of my bug bears with Reddit is how quickly things get buried. The bug bear has turned into the basis for what I been building on the side called The Full Stack. A platform to show off developer projects basically. Another bug bear of mine over the years has been trying to find open source or just cool side projects to work on with others, and even find teams to join. So that's another thing we've built, an easy way to find…
2023 · thefullstack.network · its alternatives →
- 18
I’ve spent the last 2.5 months building a product that runs LLM-powered code reviews on my pull requests — and I just launched it. The tool is built specifically for solo developers. You install it on your repo, trigger a scan by creating a pull request, and it leaves structured review comments using OpenAI under the hood. Funnily enough, I used the dev version of this app to review its own pull requests while building it. It helped me spot bugs, simplify structure, and keep quality high — all with minimal need for another human in the loop. Things I want to try out in the next months : -…
2025 · codii.dev · its alternatives →
- 19
I built a minimal opensource CMS, I use it myself for my blog and for other SaaS. l love blogging, and sometimes I post random thoughts on my blog. The only thing is, I always did it with .md files, which is fine too However, I was excited about the idea of using a CMS that was very minimal and avoiding the option of connecting something like WordPress or other big platforms. Open source (if you want to fork it or contribute) and free to use (unless I see you have a million views haha). Star the repo if you like it!
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Hello everyone, I have always loved coding and in the couple I was thinking of making an open source project and it turned out to be awesome I hope you guys like it. I present Explore Singapore which I created as an open-source intelligence engine to execute retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on Singapore's public policy documents and legal statutes and historical archives. The objective required building a domain-specific search engine which enables LLM systems to decrease errors by using government documents as their exclusive information source. What my Project does :- basically it…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21YA
I must say I was encouraged to post my project here when I saw the positive response to this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3780731 Before you make any comments, please keep in mind that the project is written for fun. I'm not forcing anyone to use it. In fact, nobody should use the current unstable version in a serious project. Here is the link: http://github.com/bsg/libserv Please share your thoughts. All criticisms are welcome, even the harsh ones. p.s. The project is still a work-in-progress.
2012 · its alternatives →
- 22RO
I was lucky enough to have my site trending on Friday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25872922). It’s an icon site that lists open source icons. I wanted to share some stats on the results after 3 days. Worth noting was that I submitted it on a Friday morning (at which point I went for a walk and a coffee; eek). - 24,997 page views. I (embarrassingly) didn’t have GA set up when I first submitted it, so this is probably missing a few hundred page views - 21 “feedback” emails (half of which were spam). I assume such a high percentage of these were spam because my Feedback…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 23UI
Hey everyone! I am excited to share updates on four of my & my teams' open-source projects that take large-scale search systems to the next level: USearch, UForm, UCall, and StringZilla. These projects are designed to work seamlessly together, end-to-end—covering everything from indexing and AI to storage and networking. And yeah, they're optimized for x86 AVX2/512 and Arm NEON/SVE hardware. USearch [1]: Think of it as Meta FAISS on steroids. It's now quicker, supports clustering of any granularity, and offers multi-index lookups. Plus, it's got more native bindings than probably…
2023 · usearch-images.com · its alternatives →
- 24AC
I have collected some of the front-end development tools that I use on a regular basis (and on not so regular basis). This list is still a work in progress and I would love any contributions to it. If you want to contribute just head over to https://github.com/KarlHerler/front-end-tools where you will find the entire source. If you find something that looks wrong but dont want to fix it you can head over to https://github.com/KarlHerler/front-end-tools/issues and submit a bug :P
2011 · karlherler.github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →